Monthly Archives: July 2003

John Fund has a nice piece in the Journal about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s possible run for Governor of California. Fund seems to assume that Arnold will be in the race, although his statement that Arnold’s “campaign advisers” “believe” he will enter the race is meaningless. For what it’s worth, I hope he runs. Schwarzenegger is a man of extraordinary ability and, above all, determination. Like George W. Bush, he is goal-driven »

Yesterday, we posted a column by Bill Kristol that concluded: “But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush’s foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush’s Democratic critics, they know no such thing.” Today, Al Kamen of the Washington Post points out that, in 1952, Kristol’s father, neo-conservative legend Irving Kristol, had this to say in »

AFP, the French news service, is skeptical that Uday and Qusay Hussein are really dead. Check out the qualifiers in this AFP photo story: “Corpses said to be of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday (background) and Qusay (front), who US forces announced were killed in a fierce gun battle 22 July in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, lie in the US airforce morgue at the Baghdad airport. »

…and, as we have all had to re-learn over the past two years, the home of the brave. The photo below is from a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles earlier today. It shows thousands of new U.S. citizens, from all corners of the globe, waving American flags to celebrate their citizenship. »

Today Al Sharpton did a photo-op in front of the Liberian Mission to the U.N., where he criticized President Bush for not invading Liberia as he did Iraq. Sharpton charged that the Bush administration “has a different foreign policy when it deals with people of color.” Does this mean that Sharpton is the only Democratic candidate, besides Joe Lieberman, who thinks that the invasion of Iraq was a good thing? »

Michelle Malkin takes the Secret Service to task for its foolish investigation of Michael Ramirez, one of maybe three conservative editorial cartoonists in the country. (If you missed that teapot tempest, it arose out of a pro-Bush cartoon by Ramirez; we posted on it and reproduced the cartoon here.) Michelle goes on to point out a problem more serious than the Secret Service’s Inspector Clouseau routine with Ramirez: the fact »

That’s the title of Charles Krauthamer’s status report on the war against terror. As Krauthammer correctly notes, the last twenty-two months have seen progress in countries ranging in an arc from Afghanistan to Syria: “That’s every country from the Khyber Pass to the Mediterranean Sea. Everywhere you look, the forces of moderation have been strengthened. This is a huge strategic advance not just for the region but for the world, »

My impression is that the release yesterday of the report on the intelligence agencies’ performance prior to 9/11 by the Joint Intelligence Committee was a non-event. With 20/20 hindsight, the fact that hijackers had contacts with people who were known to the F.B.I. is hardly remarkable. I won’t have anything more to say about the report until I’ve had time to review it carefully, but in the meantime, the full »

I’ve said that the Democrats’ attacks on President Bush over the Niger uranium “issue” are dumb, but it’s beyond me to tell whether they’re good politics. Bill Clinton, for one, apparently believes they’re not, as his sort-of defense of President Bush on the Larry King show is being taken as a warning to Democratic Presidential candidates not to stray too far to the left. A number of Congressional Democrats have »

The Harold Meyerson piece posted below should be read in conjunction with this column by Bill Kristol. The piece centers on Dick Gephardt’s recent claim that “George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago.” Kristol finds this absurdity to be symptomatic of the Democrats’ lack of seriousness on national security matters, a lack of seriousness that has even Bill Clinton concerned. As »

Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect is the latest liberal addition to the increasingly left-wing Washington Post op-ed page. But unlike E.J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, etc., Meyerson is, at times, insightful. In this piece, he provides a sober look at the Democratic presidential hopefuls from the liberal perspective. He finds that his party has not been “this angry at itself since 1968” and concludes that, despite obvious shortcomings, John Kerry »

Dick Cheney gave what sounds like an excellent speech today in defense of the Administration’s Iraq policy, based on this account in the Boston Globe: “‘Had the Bush administration not acted, Saddam and his sons would still be in power, torture chambers would still exist, mass graves would still be undiscovered, terrorists would still have a safe haven in Iraq and Saddam would still have vast wealth to finance weapons »

George Will on the extent to which key Bush administration policies are at odds with basic conservative principles. Will notes that the next traumatic experience for conservatives may occur when (or if) Bush appoints a Supreme Court Justice. This, in fact, may be the point of the recent surge in complaints about the administration’s obvious centrism — to decrease the likelihood of such trauma by reminding the adminstration not to »

That was the slogan on lawn signs in Minnesota prior to the war; in today’s Wall Street Journal, blogger Stephen den Beste addresses the “real reason we went into Iraq”: “…to create a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation. To create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy and successful and not ruled by corrupt monarchs or brutal dictators. This would demonstrate »